Carlos Betancourt is a contemporary visual artist based in Miami, Florida. In his multidisciplinary artworks, Betancourt explores issues of memory and personal experiences, while also dwelling in matters of beauty, identity and communication. By means of reexamination, he recycles and reinterprets the past and delivers it in a new and relevant context. Influenced by personal memories, he believes that art is informed by one’s own experiences, not necessarily the other way around.
In October 2015, Carlos Betancourt: Imperfect Utopia was published by Skira/Rizzoli. The monograph explores Betancourt’s body of work with more than 250 images and essays by Inaugural poet Richard Blanco and Robert Farris Thompson, Dean of the History of Art Department at Yale University. The artist has participated in several book signing in museums and institutions nationally and internationally and the book has received excellent reviews, including best art book in Interview Magazine.
In November 2015, Re-Collections, a mid-career retrospective of the artist artworks, opened at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, (MAC), in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Like the book, the exhibit received excellent reviews and was selected as Critic’s Pick in Art Forum magazine.
Betancourt’s artwork is part of numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida, San Antonio Museum of Art and the McNay Art Museum in Texas, El Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, and Palm Springs Art Museum, California. His artwork has been included in multiple solo and group exhibitions, as well as art fairs such as Art Basel and ARCO. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Florida Department of State Millennium Cultural Recognition Award.